Linus Torvalds Makes Bold Claim That 2016 'Will Be The Year Of The ARM Laptop'

Where Linux is concerned, no one's opinions are weighed quite as heavily as Linus Torvald's, so when he makes a bold claim, it's worth paying attention. At LinuxCon Europe this week, the Linux creator partook in a fireside chat with Intel's Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist Dirk Hohndel, and from the conversation, a few interesting things were revealed.

First and foremost, Linus gave a major pat on the back to ARM by saying that he suspects 2016 will be the "year of the ARM laptop". He's willing to adopt one himself, saying, "One of these days, I will actually have a machine with ARM."

It's an interesting thing to claim, as most of the world's desktop software runs on x86 code, not ARM. Adobe Photoshop, for example, wouldn't run on ARM unless Adobe compiled it for the architecture (and that's putting it simply), so to picture ARM becoming a popular choice for notebooks next year does strike me as a bit ambitious.

One thing that does work in ARM's favor, though, is that there have already been fairly successful notebook platforms on the market already, such as the Chromebook. Beyond that, there exist many Linux distributions that have ARM versions; those include Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and Gentoo, to name a few.

Besides this bold claim, Linus had some other interesting things to say. When queried about his thoughts on Linux containers, he quipped, "I enjoy all the buzzwords." I am sure the folks at Docker will be just thrilled to hear that kind of reaction!

On the non-software side, Linux also mentions that Dublin bus drivers try "to kill you". Perhaps the buses should be controlled by Linux, rather than regular drivers, then?